


dona nobis pacem

by lyhoradka



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano deserved better, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-23
Updated: 2016-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-28 11:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6327733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyhoradka/pseuds/lyhoradka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ahsoka Tano has survived, but she has not been spared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dona nobis pacem

**Author's Note:**

> The title refers both to its original meaning in Catholic mass, and to Max Richter's composition ("Dona Nobis Pacem 01") which I highly recommend.

CHORUS: Brave girl.

KASSANDRA: People never say that to a lucky person, do they.

[ _Agamemnon_ , Aeschylus (trans. Anne Carson)]

 

* * *

 

Ahsoka Tano celebrates her twenty fourth birthday in the Soo system, on Nodia, a spit’s distance away from Bothan Space. The sky pours out bucket after bucket of water that approaches dangerous levels of acidity, and the farmers exchange worried glances and tired head-shakes. Still, they crowd into the cantina each night and trade their worries for mugs of the local brew. A surprising number of them have a smile or two for the traveler who will not be staying long, by the looks of her.

“Eh, no need.” The owner’s skin is a darker green than her eyes, her smile a grumpy thing. “You been helping me ‘round here plenty. Keep your credits.” She sets down the dinner and refills a glass. Ahsoka blinks at her.

“Thank you, Tani,” she says, as close to the local dialect as she can manage. It earns her another sharp-toothed smile.

* * *

 

The star at the center of the Soo system is an angry heart, beating in tandem with the planet closest to it. The locals call the planet Bessmerti – without death. Its surface temperature is over forty-five times what is considered habitable in most of the galaxy; it orbits its sun in barely over a standard galactic day.

They are so close together that the sun consumes it, slowly and relentlessly. Bessmerti has less than ten million years to live.

“Isn’t it rare for a sun to destroy a planet like that?” Ahsoka asks, curious. The locals shake their heads at her and roll their eyes toward the heavens, their smiles patronizing and their eyes kind. _Perhaps so_ , they say, _but it is happening here_. The planet is too small and far away to see from Nodia. Ahsoka squints into the sun, tries to see two shapes instead of one.

She is watching the sun set and counting heartbeats when Tani settles heavily beside her several hours later. Ahsoka spares a tentative smile, welcoming; the woman does not look at the sky. “I had a son like you,” she says. “A very long time ago.”

The story writes itself in the tired slope of Tani’s shoulders, the steel wrapped tight around her throat that keeps her chin pointed proudly forward. “Seven years ago,” Ahsoka says, comprehending. Grief creeps to her through the Force like a pup with his tail between his legs, worn thin around the edges. It is a story well-read and well-known, its pages yellowing with overuse. It has been pushed from armchairs too often, left out in the sun for far too long.

“You have been spared.”

“No.” Ahsoka shakes her head, a bitter child still. “I haven’t been.”

* * *

 

The next day, she asks Tani over breakfast: “How did you know about me?”

She carries her lightsabers in the bottom of her pack, wears dusty traveler’s garments that have seen better days, and bribes guards with credits instead of digging in their minds. She is no Jedi – they are all dead, now.

But Tani is no fool, either. “The Force clings to you, sweetheart,” she tells Ahsoka. “When a bunch of Jedi knock on your door and tell you that your child will be taken from you in a few years’ time, you start to listen for what makes him special.” She makes a low sound in the back of her throat, raspy like a cough. “And once you figure it out, you never forget it.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that.” It’s another thing that sets Ahsoka’s teeth on edge, another puzzle. Did the Jedi know and simply keep it to themselves? “Are you Force-sensitive, then?”

“A mother’s love, nothing more,” Tani says, but it is too ironic to be true. She looks at Ahsoka as if she can see her bones and knows their names besides. “You Jedi aren’t so special.”

“I’m not a Jedi,” Ahsoka says reflexively.

Tani squints at her. “Hmm.”

“Truly, I’m –” Ahsoka wonders how much it might be safe to say, to this proud old woman who lives with a hole the shape of her son’s love in her chest, and watches a planet die from sunrise to sunset. “I was no Jedi even before the Temple burned,” she says at last.

“I was a mother before my son was taken, and I have been a mother since,” Tani tells her. “Some things, once you know them, they never leave your joints. Like that.” She taps Ahsoka on the shoulder and then uses it to heave herself to a standing position. “What if all you can do is try and carve out a place for something different? No use in wasting time on patching up a hole that won’t be fixed, youngling. None of us live in the same house forever.”

* * *

 

At twenty five, Ahsoka kisses a girl from Mandalore. Her hair is a dark brown uncharacteristic of her homeland, but the shade of her eyes is so much like Duchess Satine’s that Ahsoka can’t look away for a moment too long. She freezes on the street and stares, her heartbeat a drum in her ears.

“You got a problem?” The girl has a knife at each hip and a ferocious scowl. When she tilts her head, Ahsoka lets out a breath. It’s just a trick of the light, just a particular shade of blue – the rest of the girl is a stranger.

“It’s just,” _you reminded me of a dead woman, for a moment. sorry your home world’s such a fucking mess_ ; “Nothing. My mistake. Can I make it up to you?”

It turns out that she can. The girl’s name is Mari (“no last name?” Ahsoka grins at her. _are you saying you got one?_ ), and she hasn’t seen Concordia in more than a decade. Ahsoka tells her that she has not visited her own planet since she was four years old.

Their first night in the bed-and-breakfast’s bare room is good. The second night is better. The third is spent on Mari’s ship.

* * *

 

It turns out that Mari knows Chewbacca. When they meet up somewhere ass-deep on Jakku to exchange information and a handful of credits, Ahsoka is nursing a broken finger and a mug of beer while Mari flags down the Wookie. Chewbacca looks at her, glances to her empty belt, and growls, “You look like a bantha took a shit on you, kid. Let me buy you another drink.”

“You two know each other?” Mari perks up, intrigued and beaming. “How?”

“Shot down a hunters’ ship and saved my skin, she did.” Chewbacca settles into the space next to Ahsoka and leans over, jerking a chin in Mari’s direction. “So, kid, is she a good lay? I’ve heard some mixed reviews.”

Ahsoka laughs and pushes her beer in his direction while they wait for a fresh round of drinks, and Mari makes a production out of feeling wounded. Chewbacca’s gaze is clear, though, and when he excuses himself to take a piss, damnit, a few hours later, Ahsoka slips away to follow him.

Chewbacca looks no different from the last time that she saw him. She feels unbalanced with only a dagger, thrown into space like a meteor heading for collision. Chewbacca lowers his voice until it is almost incomprehensible, and the vertigo is gone. “Look, Mari and I got some business near Thyferra. I take it she assumes that you’ll come with us.”

Ahsoka absorbs this silently. “You don’t think I should?”

“It’d be fucking suicide, kid,” Chewbacca tells her, rough and serious. “The bounty on a Jedi is a small fortune in that shithole.”

“I’m no Jedi,” Ahsoka says. It is suddenly difficult to hold back tears.

Chewbacca hugs gently, like he’s worried about snapping her bones, and drops something that might be the Wookie equivalent of a kiss to the top of her head. “I know.”

* * *

 

 _Mari Kast_ , she whispers in Ahsoka’s ear the next morning. _That’s my name_.

Ahsoka opens her mouth, her own name stuck in her throat like an ember, but Mari is already backing away. _I know. I know who you are._

The next time they see each other, Mari has a ring on her finger and a list of General Ackbar’s orders in hand, and she’s pointing across the hangar to a dark-skinned woman with a pilot’s helmet like a flame. _Wanna meet the missus, Ahsoka Tano?_

But that’s later.

* * *

 

Spring has crept into Alderaan with about as much notice and fanfare as Ahsoka’s borrowed ship. The snow around Aldera refuses to melt, covering the mountains like a veil, but the city itself is already mud and steel and fledgling flowers the color of the sky. Ahsoka has come here only in the summer. Somehow that makes it easier to breathe.

She introduces herself as an old friend from Coruscant, just a maid who used to serve Senator Organa his tea, and it turns out to be enough. They take her to a balcony that looks over the mist and waterfalls; she half-expects to see Padme leaning over the railing and holding out her hand.

Instead it is Breha Organa weaving flowers into the hair of a young girl with a datapad in her lap. The girl is a short, frail-looking thing, but the determination in the jut of her chin could mow mountains into dust. She looks up at Ahsoka’s entrance, her eyes a dear, familiar brown, and Ahsoka reaches out through the Force like a woman damned.

Leia sings through the Force, pure and fierce, a brand of righteousness upon the world. She has the grief of Polis Massa in her veins, and the water of Naboo, and the sand of Tattoine like a field of stars. She has her mother’s voice whispering _Leia_ underneath her fingernails, and the ice of Obi-Wan’s lips on her forehead ( _I am meant for infinite sadness, but you, child, are meant for infinite love_ ), and her father’s absence around her throat, loose like a necklace, like a fist.

“Oh, we have a visitor,” Leia says, sitting up. Her smile guts Ahsoka and pulls at the entrails, weaves a bloody tapestry out of them. “Hello.”

Jedi can only dream of the compassion in Breha’s eyes as she rises to embrace Ahsoka. “I am so happy to see you, my dear,” she whispers. “You have been sorely missed.” And Ahsoka cries and cries, the end of a voyage.

“Does she know?” she asks as soon as Leia has gone to fetch her father from his office.

Breha shakes her head. “She knows that Bail and I did not bring her into the world, but it isn’t safe for her to know the full truth. Padme Amidala’s children died with her, Ahsoka. We’ve done all we could to make sure that the Empire does not doubt that.”

“Children?” Ahsoka counts the mountains peaks in the distance and does her best to reach into the pool of calm that the Jedi have tried so hard to instill in her.

“Twins.” Breha purses her mouth, unhappy. “Master Kenobi took the boy.”

 By the time Ahsoka finds herself alone with Senator Organa, she hates Anakin a little bit less. The man has aged twenty years in a decade, his hair turned to a crown of gray, but his grip on her hand feels like certainty.

“I need your help,” he tells her. “I’m so damn glad that you’re here.”

So she lays her lightsabers at the feet of the Rebel Alliance and sheds her name once again, becomes a hooded figure on a holo projector. She turns twenty six years old on Alderaan, and gives her dagger to Princess Leia as a gift. The girl’s grip is sure, not too tight; the Force around her wavers. “I’ll take care of it, I promise,” she says solemnly. In that moment, she is no one Ahsoka knows.

“I’ll see you soon, Leia.” Asoka grins at her and presses a light kiss to the girl’s cheek, remembers the chill in the winds of Mortis and Anakin’s fingers on her shoulder and the warmth of his embrace and the catch in his throat. _Nothing much, Snips_. “Careful with the blade, alright? It’s sharper than it looks.”

* * *

 

Maz Kanata squints at Fulcrum across the bar and passes over a drink, hand lingering over Fulcrum’s knuckles. She is no fool, but her smile is almost kind. “Happy birthday, child.” She blinks through her glasses. “Who are you?”

 It’s a funny sort of feeling, to have the history of a war in your bones and spend over a decade wiping it out. Ahsoka Tano lives in history books and field reports, in the stones of the Jedi Temple. She is in graffiti that covers Mandalore like a plague – grass sprouting from her lightsabers, _we will die at the hands of corruption_ scribbled angrily over her stomach, her face unrecognizable. She is in Coruscant’s prisons and the children of its dead.

 _I’m Master Skywalker’s Padawan learner_. Fulcrum smiles, unbreakably good and bitterly unlucky. “I’m no one.”

**Author's Note:**

> The Soo system, Nodia, and the planet Bessmerti are made up, but the planet itself is actually based on a real-life exoplanet WASP-12b which is, indeed, orbiting its sun at such a close distance that it is being consumed over time.  
> The summary is a closely paraphrased quote from Catherynne M. Valente's "Deathless."
> 
> [hmu](http://lyhoradka.tumblr.com) and listen to me cry about how much i love ahsoka tano


End file.
